This creepy, skinless dog may be the future of veterinary school

This terrifying, skinless dog cadaver could finally end an
ethically dubious practice and help train better veterinarians.

SynDaver Labs, the company
that's building the fake skinless dogs, hopes that it will
provide an alternative to a highly controversial veterinary
teaching practice known as terminal surgery.

In terminal surgeries, a veterinary school will take unwanted
live animals from shelters, anesthetize them, and then have
students practice advanced surgical techniques on them. Once the
surgery is over, the animal — regardless of whether or not it'd
survive — is euthanized.

It's a complicated ethical situation, considering the
overcrowding of shelters, the fact that the animals would have
been euthanized anyway, and that cadavers don't offer the best
real-world training for incoming vets. (No one wants an
operating-room accident to be the end of their pet.)

The good news is that terminal surgeries have rapidly fallen out
of practice, and many veterinary schools now offer virtual
alternatives for students wishing to opt out. But terminal
surgeries are still a thing — so SynDaver hopes to replace
the practice entirely with their realistic fake cadaver, and is
enlisting crowdfunding to help them speed up the process.

"If we launched this product organically, it might take us a
decade to put canine cadavers into every veterinary college and
many more animals would die needlessly as a result," Dr.
Christopher Sakezles, founder and CTO of SynDaver Labs said in a
press release. "With the help of the crowdfunding campaign,
we can do this practically overnight, and start to put an end to
terminal labs for good."

In addition to the SynDaver Canine, SynDaver has been building
synthetic human cadavers and tissues for years, though the need
for synthetic human cadavers is considerably less controversial.

Judge
Public Relations photo handout by Justin Mayfield

The
IndieGoGo campaign for the synthetic dog is incredibly
ambitious. The company hopes to rake in $24 million, although
it's a flexible goal — meaning that any funds raised are theirs,
regardless of whether or not the goal is reached. If they do
reach their goal, they intend to provide 20 dog cadaver
simulators to every accredited veterinary college in the world.

They're not like the freaky, unrealistic simulators you may have
used to learn CPR. The SynDaver Canine is designed to be
hyper-realistic and a huge "upgrade" to real animal cadavers,
which don't move or behave the same way as something that's alive
and on the operating table.

"They aren’t just bodies by appearance, they incorporate all of
the organ systems made from materials that mimic the organ
systems properly," Sakezles said in the IndieGo video. "They're
perfused. They breathe. They bleed."

And unlike a real dog might, the SynDaver dog doesn't seem to
mind its nightmarish lack of skin.